Fritz Zwicky was the first astronomer to propose the existence of dark matter, supernovas, neutron stars, galactic cosmic rays, gravitational lensing by galaxies, and galaxy clusters. However, he remains virtually unknown to the public to this day.

Earth is in constant motion – it rotates on its axis once every day, revolves around the Sun once a year, and as part of the solar system, orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy every 240 million or so years. What is Earth’s speed and acceleration for all of these motions?

Will an unsung astronomy pioneer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, finally get the credit she deserves? In 1895 Henrietta Swan Leavitt volunteered as an unpaid assistant at Harvard College Observatory. Her work on Cepheid variable stars led to the discovery of galaxies beyond our Milky Way, the expansion of the universe, and the big bang. Leavitt’s Law […]

Are we in danger from the upcoming solar flare? On March 9, 2012 at 03:58 Universal Time (7:28 PM on March 9, PDT) the sunspot, AR 1429, (the same sunspot that gave us the X5 event of earlier this week) unleashed an M6 class solar flare. The resulting Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) will reach earth’s […]

What does Phobos look like? A new computer model of the Martian moon may have the answers. The moons Phobos and Deimos, fear and panic, are fitting companions for Mars, the god of war. With all the attention that space agencies have paid to studying Mars, the Martian moons have received relatively little attention. With […]

An international team of astronomers generated the largest map yet of the most abundant (and most mysterious) form of matter in our universe — dark matter. Results support the view that this invisible substance is the cosmic glue which holds galaxies and clusters of galaxies together. Unseen Matter and the Motion of Galaxies In 1933, Swiss/American […]